3 ms·
CPUs have been progressing faster in the last few years, mainly because of AMD's Ryzen line. In laptops, 4 cores are now standard, and if you can gen one of the
by dvdkon 6y ago
CPUs have been progressing faster in the last few years, mainly because of AMD's Ryzen line. In laptops, 4 cores are now standard, and if you can gen one of the AMD 4000U CPUs, 8 cores with good single-threaded performance are relatively cheap. Same thing on desktop, you can get 20%+ more performance by upgrading the CPU.
Sure, it's not the same as 486 vs Pentium, but the Ivy Bridge-era CPUs that were used for such a long time are now equivalent to low-end CPUs, it's no longer universally better to get an old i7 vs a new i5. That said, if you're happy, there's no reason to upgrade.
- fulafel 6y agoCore count > 2 doesn't help general responsiveness much with the current state of software.
- dvdkon 6y agoI definitely disagree. When having a video conferencing app open can use 100% of a single core, 2 cores just isn't enough for anyone even remotely multitasking. Same with a browser running some demanding JS for whatever reason or system updates.
- duffyjp 6y agoI'm in the process of returning an i3-9100 based Dell Precision. It's a true 4 core and despite no hyper-threading on the benchmark sites it beats my Haswell Xeon E3 in both multi and single threaded tests. In reality however it's a dog. It gets bogged down for the lightest workloads. It's also using MORE electricity from the wall, as the old PowerEdge T20 system was an ATX12VO design with a Xeon 1275L. I'll extend your comment to say that old i7 is universally better than new i3 (and I should have known better).
- Synaesthesia 6y agoSSD performance is quite important for perceived speed.